


ce ne sont que des cailloux

by pebblysand



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Book 7: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Canon Compliant, Courage, F/M, Family, Gen, Minor Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley, POV Fleur Delacour, Post-Hogwarts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-17 09:22:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29097978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pebblysand/pseuds/pebblysand
Summary: Ici, les nuages se mélangent à l’eau,she tells Gabby, describing the way the clouds and the sea blur into the horizon, the wind and the light sand, the beauty of the fifty-meter-high cliffs and the grass that, even in the summer, never burns.J’espère que tu pourras venir bientôt,she writes and lies (lieslieslies), often, because God knows she doesnot,in fact, hope that her sister will be able to come soon. With all her might, with everything that she holds dear and all the courage that she can muster, Fleur prays to all that is holy that Gabby never, ever, sets foot here.(Here is a place where house-elves die, where the tremors run down Hermione’s spine, and it is not a place for a child.)
Relationships: Fleur Delacour/Bill Weasley
Comments: 2
Kudos: 17





	ce ne sont que des cailloux

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [overemotional: in defense of cho chang](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1854957) by [dirgewithoutmusic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirgewithoutmusic/pseuds/dirgewithoutmusic). 



> I am aware of that fact that my interest in Fleur is very niche, but here it is. I've translated the handful of sentences in French from the fic in the end notes *but* don't worry, the fic is written in a way that you don't really need to read French to understand what was said. 
> 
> Also, while we don't really know yet what happened between Hitler and Grindelwald in the 1940s, I figure they would have gotten on well when it came to killing millions of innocent people. Just a thought.
> 
> Lastly, this is sort of inspired by the wonderful series from dirgewithoutmusic "we must unite inside her walls or we'll crumble from within", which you should 100% read. Obviously, that series is centred around hogwarts houses but it got me thinking of more underestimated side characters and made me wonder what I would write "in defence of Fleur."
> 
> I really doubt that anyone will read this so please, if you do, leave a review haha.

_ ce ne sont que des cailloux _

.

Her mother used to say that flowers bloomed in the spring - that Fleur should, too. That she should sit up straight and be careful to leave her skirt free of creases, to cross her legs elegantly, observe and _think,_ because most men can’t. ‘You should find one who does,’ her mother advised. She was five. ‘It’s hard. You’ve got to ignore the ones who act on instinct. They look at you but they don’t see _you,_ darling.’

Fleur never thought that she’d been born beautiful; she thought she’d been born broken. Could see the way men stared at her in the streets everywhere she went, the way they would adjust their trousers or wolf-whistle when they walked past her. She sometimes wondered what would have happened if she’d been a boy, if that would have stopped them from _looking._

‘I’m sorry, love,’ her mother said, once, to the girl in front of her who never got to call herself pretty, to glow up, never got to watch the boys’ glances over her body change as she grew older, more confident in herself. They were always there.

When Gabby and she were kids, her mother sat them down and explained what a Veela was, that boys would be attracted to them regardless of their age, and that girls would be jealous. Those were things that needed not be dwelled upon. ‘It does not matter,’ her mother said.

For a moment, Fleur remembers wondering what _did._ (She found out later.)

So, the truth is: during her first summer at The Burrow, she never minded Molly’s recriminations, Ginny’s nicknames or Hermione’s insecurities. She was used to them. They were all rather judgmental, but so is she.

.

When Fleur first met Bill, she didn’t like him very much. Overhead him talking to one of the men at the bank, one day over lunch. ‘Bit cold, isn’t she?’ the other man said, fingers greasy with the mayonnaise of his sandwich. ‘I mean, she’s fit and all – sure, I want to fuck her, you know, but not really get to know her.’

Fleur remembers that Bill stood up, then, silently and rather unexpectedly, took his food and exited the room. It didn’t seem to be part of a bigger plan, or a gesture particularly thought out, so she dismissed him the way her mother had taught her, as one of the boys who were all instinct and no thoughts.

. 

The day when that changed is crystal clear in her mind. It was one afternoon at the bank when Adrian Grossfingers seemed to linger a bit too close to her desk, always looking for a reason to talk to her. She caught him looking down her cleavage when she leaned in to grab a couple of files off her desk and once he was finally gone, Bill said: ‘Must be hard.’

She remembers looking at him, then, ready to see the look of faux-compassion that men would sometimes give her to get inside her pants, but it wasn’t there. He’d stated it as a fact, she realised, to himself rather than to her, like something he had felt in his gut so deeply that he couldn’t help getting it out. He hadn’t considered his words beforehand, and that was the beauty of it.

She looked at him and decided that this was the man she was going to marry. 

.

When Bill finally popped the question, she could tell that he was ashamed. The ring in the box was small, yet all of his savings had gone into it. She slipped it down her finger with a degree of determination that rivalled her grandmother’s. ‘Diamonds are rocks,’ she said. ‘That’s all they are.’

_I love you,_ she thought, and that night, shifted their story to present tense. Too many times, she decided, she’d let her ghosts haunt her. Too many times, she’d let her story be told, rather than lived.

Her wedding day didn’t happen, she thinks. It _happens_.

.

That day, she wears Muriel’s tiara to keep the peace. It is not a fight that she feels she can carry, not in the middle of a war. Every time she looks at Molly, these days, it is not the eye-rolls of their first summer that Fleur tries to forget, it is the way she almost called the wedding off mere weeks away from it. Bill was lying in a hospital bed and it occurred to Fleur that she’d never known _fear_ until that day, when _twice_ he was almost taken away. It felt like the ground had collapsed under her feet, like she could forgive the teases and the _phlegm-s_ but not this. 

‘You don’t ever quit,’ Bill smiled through the pain, that night, and she held his hand.

‘I love you,’ she said. Smiled, too. ‘ _Comme un fou, comme un soldat, comme cette putain de chanson qui n’en finit pas.’_

He asked what it meant. She burst out a laugh and told him the truth.

‘It means I love you more than anything.’

.

Afterwards, Bill apologises for their wedding day, as though it were his fault. ‘I should have said “sod them,”’ he whispers to her, that night. He’s pacing, panicking; his dad’s patronus hasn’t found the kids yet. Fleur stays by his side because for the first time in her life, she knows _exactly_ that this is where she needs to be. ‘We should have done it in France,’ he adds. 

It’s no use contradicting him. So, for as long as it takes, she makes sure that her hand never hovers too far away from his, rock-hard and reliable like a diamond, and she loves him. 

.

They manage to arrange a Portkey back home for her family. ‘You should go with them,’ he says.

It is dark, that night, in his old bedroom at his parents’ house, and fear filters in his sister’s voice as Fleur notices that yet another argument is burgeoning between her and Molly, a couple of floors down.

She catches Bill’s look as she finishes stocking Gabby’s suitcase up with a few Chocolate Frogs and Sugar Quills, and: ‘Please, Fleur,’ Bill adds. She hears him breathing in the way he does when he is scared, like he breathes in and forgets to breathe out. ‘This is not your war. I don’t want -’

In preparation for this conversation, she’d set her wand on the bedside table at the other end of the room so that she wouldn’t be able to reach for it. Anger rises in her chest; she feels it flow to the tips of her fingers, slowly filling her like that day when she was seventeen and came last in a tournament she’d spent her life preparing for. She tries to concentrate on the man she loves, the kind and caring man whose misplaced anxiety made him say the unthinkable.

A memory of their early days runs through her head: Molly and Ginny, and their constant glares. ‘I’m sorry,’ Bill said, looking down to the floor. ‘They’ll warm up to you, I know they will -’

She interrupted him with a laugh. These were different times. ‘Bill, I’m marrying _you,_ ’ she said, shrugging in that way that he claims to find endearing – ‘the French shrug,’ he often calls it, like that’s supposed to mean something. ‘I’m not marrying your family. I love you; I don’t care what they think. I’m not Harry,’ she added. Bill looked up at that and she couldn’t help but feel like she’d been a _good girl_ , doing her homework the way that her mother had taught her. Be graceful, be polite, be quiet. _Observe_. Information is power. ‘I already have a family,’ she pointed out. 

Fleur looks at her husband, now, a year later, wedding band heavy against her finger, and for the first time in her life, her words are cold when addressed to him.

‘You think I am doing this for you,’ she says. 

It is a statement of fact rather than a question. Bill looks down to the floor. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, again, and _this time,_ she thinks: _you better be._ It is their first and only row, the only one she ever tolerates. ‘I didn’t mean it like that.’

A breath escapes her and she crosses the room again, picks up her wand from the table and zips Gabby’s suitcase up with a quick spell. ‘Don’t you ever bring this up again,’ she says.

.

Slowly, they settle into Shell Cottage. For the first time in her life, she understands what Molly’s chickens must have felt like, all those hours locked up in their coop. Fleur watches as people from the Order come and go, as Bill goes into work. She learns to cook, for the lack of a better thing to do, then gets obsessive about it. Bakes cakes, and tarts, and chocolate mousses until Bill laughs and says: ‘I’m only one person, you know?’ Fleur can’t go into work, you see, because being foreign and part-Veela apparently isn’t something that Voldemort’s followers would approve of. At least, there is the ocean, here.

Later, she sits at their kitchen table and tries not to judge Tonks too harshly when she shows up pregnant and single. Tries to keep the resentment from her face when weeks later, Ron shows up alone, too.

‘He hates himself over it,’ Bill says, late one night, a short few days after his brother’s reappearance. He tells Molly that they’ll spend Christmas at home and takes it all in stride. They complement each other well, Fleur thinks: the Beauty and the Beast, his instincts and her analytical brains, his fears and her coolness.

‘He _left_ his friends,’ Fleur insists. Her tone is unforgiving, that night, and Bill knows why, knows that she now sees his brother as a boy who was weak and made a mistake that landed him on the wrong side of History.

‘Not everyone is as strong as you are,’ Bill tells her, then. Fleur breathes in, breathes out, remembers that this is why she loves him, the moral compass in his gut, his innate knowledge of wrong from right, his ability to be accepting of people’s weaknesses in a way that she will never be. In a way that she was _trained_ not to be. ‘What do you want me to do? Send him back?’

Her jaw is set and so is his, already knowing what she is going to say. ‘Of course, not. Everyone is safe in my house.’ It is a promise that she made to herself a long time ago, rather than a statement of fact.

The next morning, she bakes Ron a banoffee pie.

.

As often as she can, during those few months, she writes to Gabby. Their mail is being read, perhaps even sometimes altered, so Fleur is careful to never say anything of significance. Is careful to never sound cryptic, either, because she doesn’t want those idiots to think that she might be using code.

In their notes, they discuss Gabby’s grades, or the coldness of the winter in Provence. They talk about the ocean, about the summers they used to spend running around at their grandmother’s house, on the Atlantic coast. It sat by the footpath, past the beach in Pontaillac and the Muggles who walked past the house called it: ‘the witch’s house.’ Her grandmother had enchanted it so that it looked grim and scary from the outside, unappealing to them, an assurance that no one would accidentally venture in. Fleur recalls being young and laughing at the irony of it all.

In her head, she associates those days with the smell of iodine, the gross feeling of mudflats under their feet as they ran into the water of the estuary. Her mother used to shout cautionary words after them not to go near the _baïnes._

_Ici, les nuages se mélangent à l’eau_ , she tells Gabby, describing the way the clouds and the sea blur into the horizon, the wind and the light sand, the beauty of the fifty-meter-high cliffs and the grass that, even in the summer, never burns. _J’espère que tu pourras venir bientôt_ , she writes and lies (lieslieslies), often, because God knows she does _not_ hope that her sister will be able to come, soon. With all her might, with everything that she holds dear and all the courage that she can muster, Fleur prays to all that is holy that Gabby never, _ever,_ sets foot here.

(Here is a place where house-elves die, where the tremors run down Hermione’s spine and it is _not_ a place for a child.)

.

She doesn’t write to her parents, finds it harder to lie to them. Her mother sends food in cardboard boxes carried across the country and over the Channel by a couple of owls. In there, Fleur finds: honey, tapenade, goose foie gras when Christmas rolls around, a packet of calissons and a box of pastilles de Vichy. For reasons that she hates, the last ones make her think of her grandmother.

Hidden inside one of the labels, she finds a note bearing the long ‘f’s of her mother’s cursive handwriting.

_Nous sommes fiers de toi, ma chérie._

We are proud of you, darling.

There is _that,_ Fleur thinks.

.

When she was seven years old, she remembers locking a boy in a broom closet. Not with magic, not by accident. Her parents had enrolled her in the local Muggle school so that she would at least be taught maths and how to write. With the both of them working full-time at the Ministry, there just wasn’t any other way.

Fleur remembers the school in the winding streets of Aix-en-Provence, the boy called Clément who said that she was pretty. She didn’t thank him, didn’t grant him the attention that he clearly thought he deserved and so then, he said that she was _weird_ , pulled her braid loose. She turned around, pushed him inside the first room she could find. It turned out to be a closet and she turned the key.

Her parents were called. Fleur remembers the awkwardness of the principal who couldn’t stop gazing at her mother’s breasts – they left his office and found their way back onto the streets, exited the school in the warm, September sun. The stones of the buildings were the colour of ochre, skies blue, small shops and the lingering smell of fresh pastries. ‘How did they find him?’ her mother asked, quick. 

‘My friend Mélanie told them.’

‘She ratted you out?’ Fleur nodded. ‘Then, she is not your friend.’

To her mother, it didn’t matter that Melanie’s parents would beat her, or that the principal had threatened to get her expelled. Fleur remembers that the words were harsh when they came out of her mother’s mouth, that she used the verb ‘ _dénoncer_ ’ to say ‘rat out.’

As someone who speaks two, now, she knows that language is important. ‘Some nations have dozens of words to describe snow,’ her Muggle teacher had said, once. On the playground, Fleur had learnt dozens of words for what Mélanie had done. ‘ _Cafteur’, ‘mouchardeur,’ ‘cafardeur,’ ‘rapporteur,’ ‘délateur.’_ That last one was the strongest of them all, of course.

In the afternoon, her mother and she walked down the streets towards the fountain on Place des Augustins, past the side entrance to the school and a little golden plaque on the wall. Her mother shook her head and muttered: ‘ _Celle-là, on sait ce qu’elle aurait fait en quarante.’_

At seven years old, Fleur didn’t yet know what that meant. She remembers her mother sitting her down with an ice cream at a café in the little square. ‘It means that you cannot afford to be weak, Fleur. You cannot afford to let your fears or your worst instincts get the best of you. If you have a problem with someone, you deal with it yourself. You don’t go to the teachers, you don’t come to me, and if someone asks you to rat out someone else, _regardless_ of what they’ve done, you do _not_ collaborate _. Ever.’_

Fleur remembers just sitting there, for a moment, remembers being little and _scared_ because her mother’s voice was harsher than she’d ever known it to be. Fleur understood, then, that it wasn’t just boys who had bad instincts, but people in general.

‘You never want your children to ask you what you did during a war and be ashamed to tell them. Do you understand me? Bravery is a choice, darling. One that you must always make.’

.

Later, her mother had explained: ‘Your grandparents used to own a farm in the countryside,’ she’d said and added: ‘You are old enough to understand. They fell in love and they got married, and your grandmother got pregnant with me.’ A smile grazed her lips. She explained that Mamie Isabelle and Papy Louis did what other couples did, back then. Grew vegetables and brewed their own wine, tightened bales of straw and tried to ignore the noise of the war.

When their Muggle neighbours disappeared one morning while their son, Aaron, was at school, they _stupefied_ the policemen waiting for him out on the streets and went to get the little boy. They dried his tears, charmed fake IDs and raised him like their own. It happened again, and again, until in 1943, over half a dozen kids had piled up on camp beds in their attic.

‘It was a safe place,’ Fleur’s grandmother told her, once, rather stoically. Until one day, someone from her husband’s amateur Quidditch team called the Aurors and Grindelwald’s men came. Papy Louis died while his wife Apparated the children away.

‘We weren’t heroes, Fleur,’ her grandmother had said. ‘We just did what was right.’

.

For years, as a teenager, Fleur was obsessed with this story. She felt as though she were constantly moving through a series of rooms in which she had to sit, calculate and analyse how she could live up to the expectations that her grandparents’ bravery had placed upon her. How she could distinguish good from evil without ever getting them wrong, stand up for the right things; how to _never_ be weak.

Sometimes, even now, she thinks that she would love to be like Bill, for it all to just instinctively fall into place. Instead, all she ever does is project physical confidence while inside she doubts herself, like what she does – _whatever_ she does – will never be enough. At the age of seventeen, signed up for a tournament to prove to herself and to her parents that she could do it, that she could be brave, deserving of her family’s heritage. Now, _this._ She is a housewife, in the middle of a war that’s not even hers, judging people for being imperfect and not _trying_ as hard as she does.

She remembers the day Bill told her about Hogwarts houses. ‘So, what?’ she asked. ‘Like, you’re _born_ brave?’

His eyes smiled. ‘I mean, yeah, I suppose. Weren’t you?’

She laughed at that. Of course, she wasn’t _._ She worked for it, consciously, and _works_ (will continue to work) every day to make the right choices, because people’s lives depend on it. The concept of courage, to her, is not a natural one. It is one that was forcefully hammered into her brain until the fear of _not_ being brave was stronger than anything else. Courage, to her, is like a person with whom she checks in regularly, obsessed as she is to always be doing the right thing, unrelenting and systematic in her unwillingness to let _anything_ pass her by. It only took one letter, one moment of weakness from a retired Quidditch player for her grandfather to die. 

‘If they close the door,’ her grandmother used to say, ‘You get in through the window. If they come for you, you come for them.’

.

In the spring of 1998, when unfamiliar kids appear before them at Shell Cottage, Bill raises his wand in their faces, asking where they got the address. Fleur takes one look at them and in a split second, holds the door open.

.

Minutes later, it turns out that Ron gave them the address.

‘Ron?’ Bill asks.

And, ‘Ronald Weasley?’ the girl supplies, unhelpfully. At the cottage, that day, there’s a boy and a girl, and an elf, and an old man that they half-walk, half-drag over their shoulders, arms stretched between them.

‘Put him on the sofa,’ Fleur instructs. She lines up pillows and summons water and a blanket. This is where she is cold and _efficient,_ where Bill is hot-tempered and useless. They push past the kitchen table and into the sitting room; the dreaded answer eventually comes out of the boy’s mouth, the one with the red jumper and the dark skin.

Once the old man is settled, he stands up, looks at Bill’s still half-raised wand. ‘They got caught,’ he says.

His name is Dean, Fleur will learn. Right now, she counts a second, maybe two. Bill’s voice is ghostly when he speaks; she hears him breathe in. ‘ _They_?’

‘The three of them.’

In life, many things come in threes: primary colours, triplets, wheels on tricycles and the Black sisters. Bill crosses her gaze for the first time since this whole commotion started and it occurs to her that he looks the way he did the day after the wedding when their world seemed to fall apart and she held, still. He gazes, helplessly, and this is the moment when she understands what her grandfather felt, how he would have rather died than let Grindelwald take these children away.

‘Go,’ she tells Bill. ‘Warn them. I will take care.’

Take care of what, precisely, she isn’t sure. But, it is what she does.

In this, perhaps, she _is_ being brave.

.

That night, she watches Harry bury the elf and her heart aches for the children that they never were.

.

Later, he apologises. For the disruption to their lives, for the lot of them being there, and she has to keep her wand busy with the housework for fear that she might hex him. Instead, she keeps her voice even and tells him that she doesn’t mind. Doesn’t mind Ollivander and the care he requires, or the Goblin’s complaints about having to dine with them, or about the echoes of all of their nightmares throughout the night.

‘You saved my sister,’ she tells him, knowing that he didn’t, not exactly, but that he chose to, just like she _chose_ to be here, and that is what matters.

When he tells her they will leave soon, she puts on her best Molly impression because she’s noticed that _that_ scares him, and demands that they don’t. ‘You are safe here,’ she tells him. Not because of the wards, or because of the Order, but because since that day when she was seven years old, she’s learnt to trust herself.

He’d probably think she was barking mad if she told him she can feel her grandfather watching over them.

.

And so, in May, the boy who lived lives. She watches him rise back to life in the middle of the Great Hall while Bill’s tears are still fresh on his cheeks and there is a fleeting moment where she wonders why he was allowed to come back, when no one else did.

It is not a particularly charitable thought and she _is_ judgmental, so she curses herself for it.

.

She remembers that that spring, Bill obsessed over what Harry, Ron and Hermione were planning. He warned them and issued cautionary tales, and Fleur knows that he felt like they were his responsibility to protect.

‘You don’t think they’re trying to break into Gringotts, do you?’ he asked her, one night.

The following summer, when the kids find their way back to the Cottage for a weekend, the only time Fleur hears Hermione scream is when Ron lifts her over his shoulder and tosses her into the water. Bill frowns at the boy and the girl who lay side by side on the shore.

‘You don’t think Harry and Ginny are already having sex, do you?’ he asks.

Fleur smiles reassuringly and answers: ‘Of course, not,’ to both questions. The only two rules of life she’s ever known are: ‘Be brave,’ and ‘Don’t rat.’

.

When her children are born, she teaches them that if they have a problem, they can come to Mum, or to Dad, or to the teacher, or to whoever. She tells them that whatever it is, they do not have to live in the shadow of their own moral compass and that most importantly, they do not have to be alone. 

One summer at the beach house in Pontaillac, one of her aunts asks if she would ever consider moving back to France. She looks at her children playing in the waves, running around and laughing with Gabby’s kids and fiddles with the tiny rock still settled against her ring finger.

She shakes her head and tries to explain that her life’s in England, now, that she’s grown to love the ocean shore wherever it is, grown to love the wind and the way her children are taught to follow their instincts, rather than obsess over what the right thing is. That they feel it in their gut, that like Bill, they do what feels right without fear of getting it wrong, without the weight of History on their shoulders, without feeling that a single mistake could awaken and disappoint their ghosts.

_Their_ war wasn’t fought like hers, she knows.

And, she looks at her family and wants to tell them that England is home, now, but there is no word in French for ‘home.’

She finds that it fits.

**Author's Note:**

> TRANSLATIONS AND NOTES ON FRENCH CULTURE: 
> 
> [0] The title of the fic comes from one my favourite French songs by Zazie, called J'envoie Valser.  
> J'en vois des qui se donnent [I see some that give each other]  
> Donnent des bijoux dans le cou [give each other jewellery around their necks]  
> C'est beau mais quand même [it's beautiful but still]  
> Ce ne sont que des cailloux [they're only rocks]
> 
> [1] 'Comme un fou, comme un soldat, comme cette putain de chanson qui n’en finit pas.’ : 'Like a madman, like a soldier, like that fucking song that never ends.' This is in reference to a song in the 90s that was absolutely inescapable by Lara Fabian. She literally screamed off the top of her voice 'I love you, I love you, like a madman, like a soldier, like a movie star,' (yes, those were the lyrics) as a chorus in a never-ending loop (apologies to any fans of Lara in the room ^^). Think Whitney Huston's voice meets Celine Dion's lyricist. It was awful but Fleur would definitely have heard at some point during those years. 
> 
> [2] The "baïnes" phenomenon on the French Atlantic coast are small "pools" of water that form on the shores when a large wave goes over a dune and the water stays behind that dune. These are very dangerous because once the tide comes in, it creates a very strong current that - sadly - is the cause of a handful of kids drowning every year.
> 
> [3] 'Ici, les nuages se mélangent à l’eau,' : Here, the clouds mix in with water
> 
> [4] 'J’espère que tu pourras venir bientôt': I hope that you will be able to come soon. 
> 
> [5] ‘Cafteur’, ‘mouchardeur,’ ‘cafardeur,’ ‘rapporteur,’ ‘délateur’ are all words that refer to the act of telling on someone to the authorities (be it the school teachers, or the cops). This is obviously a really big theme explored at length in the fic but basically, during WW2, many people in France reported their neighbours, their friends, their acquaintances to the Nazis when they were hiding Jews or Jews themselves. This led to a society where today, it is seen very negatively when people "tell" on someone else (even if that person has done something wrong), and where we have loads of words to express that action. Which, as someone who loves language, is terribly interesting. 
> 
> [6] 'Celle-là, on sait ce qu’elle aurait fait en quarante' : This one, we know what she would have done in 1940.  
> Again, referring to the fact that Melanie ratted Fleur out to the teachers and therefore would have sold her family to the Nazis in the 1940s if she'd had a chance. Yes, this is all kinds of barking mad and yes, this is a phrase I've heard people say, even about schoolchildren. 
> 
> [7] No, there is truly no word for 'home' in French. There is a word for house, and a word for "at mine" or "at yours" but "home" isn't a thing. As a fluent speaker of both languages, I've always found that interesting.
> 
> \----
> 
> Anyway, if you've gotten this far, thanks so, so much for reading. Don't hesitate to leave a kudo or a review :).  
> (And, for anyone who is waiting on an update on Castles - yes, I am procrastinating.)


End file.
